Site Search Navigation

Search NYTimes.com

Loading...

See next articles

See previous articles

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Supported by

Let Us Now Praise Mitt Romney

November 5, 2012 9:42 amNovember 5, 2012 9:42 am

Later today, I will publish my prediction for tomorrow’s outcome — electoral, popular, the whole shebang — and unless something dramatic changes in the next few hours I’ll be prophesying an excruciatingly narrow Obama win. But before I explain why I think he’s going to just barely lose this election, let me say a few words in praise of Willard Mitt Romney, candidate for president of the United States.

I am a longtime Romney critic. Like many conservatives during the last, exhausted years of Bush’s presidency, I thought he seemed like an attractive figure from a distance, but then like almost everybody I hated the serial phoniness of his 2008 presidential campaign and looked forward to the sequel with a mix of weariness and dread. I didn’t have much of anything nice to say about him in the run-up to the G.O.P. primary season: I wrote columns touting Mitch Daniels’s stillborn candidacy, lamenting Mike Huckabee’s decision to forgo a run, and suggesting that Chris Christie might make a late leap into the race. Once the field was set, I was a sometimes conventional, sometimes lonely voice arguing for Romney’s inevitability, but that was prognostication rather than partisanship, and the twists and turns of the primary season mostly tended to remind me of his myriad flaws as a candidate. For a Republican Party that needed to somehow channel Tea Party zeal into a credible pitch to middle and working class voters skeptical of the party’s economic record, Romney had precisely the wrong profile: His moderate record meant that he had less room to maneuver ideologically than a more consistent conservative might have enjoyed; his temperament and instincts and worldview made him a poor champion for the kind of free market populism that might have bridged the gap between the Tea Party and the center; and his private equity background made him a living, breathing embodiment of everything that Rust Belt swing voters hate about “creative destruction.”

This was my judgment during the primaries, and the summertime campaign left me feeling vindicated. Romney’s strategy seemed to be all caution and zero creativity: He would campaign as the most generic sort of Republican, play for a narrow 51 percent referendum-on-the-economy win, and claim the presidency more or less by default. Given his weaknesses as a candidate — the base’s doubts, blue-collar voters’ suspicions — you could understand the theory, and see the course he hoped to chart. But it left him with little room for error, and August and September were both cruel months: The Ryan pick was bold but politically puzzling; the G.O.P. convention was a play-it-safe nothingburger, the combination of the White House’s anti-Bain attacks and Bill Clinton’s barnburner in Charlotte left Romney exposed — and then his “47 percent” disaster delivered a (self-inflicted) uppercut to the head. At that point, the Romney epitaph seemed to write itself: The wrong man in the wrong year with the wrong campaign strategy, a victim of his own party’s pathologies but also of his poor instincts and self-inflicted wounds.

If Romney loses tomorrow, that obituary would still contain strong elements of truth. But win or lose, the Romney comeback — one great debate performance, two effective follow-ups, and a late-in-the-game transformation, amazingly enough, from the most awkward and uncomfortable-seeming of candidates to a politician that voters actually seem to like — should probably change the way we think about his trajectory as a candidate, both for the Republican nomination and then the presidency. I stand by the criticisms I marshaled across the last year and more, but watching him reach out to almost, almost, grasp the prize this month, it feels like we didn’t give him enough credit for the things that he did right.

Yes, a Daniels or a Christie or a Huckabee might have beaten him if they’d entered the race, but they didn’t get in, did they? There were plenty of Republican politicians who talked big about this being a once-in-a-generation election, but none of them put themselves out there — and Romney did. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena …

Yes, he was running against a weak and beatable primary field, but he was trying to become the nominee of a party that wanted to nominate anyone — anyone! — but him, and he made the sale and did what he needed to do: Filleting Rick Perry on the debate stage, carpet-bombing Newt Gingrich in Florida and out-debating the “master debater” when it counted, putting Rick Santorum away in the same Midwestern states he’s struggling to win right now. He was inevitable, yes — but only because he actually executed, something that plenty of presidential frontrunners in the past have conspicuously failed to do.

Yes, he ran a terribly unimaginative campaign on policy, by turns vague and contradictory, offering boilerplate one moment and fuzzy math the next. But he was a non-ideological manager trying to lead a party torn by ideological civil war — a party that by rights should still be in the wilderness, working through what went wrong in the Bush era, and that lucked into its 2010 and 2012 opportunities rather than deserving them. A great politician might have been able to done better under these circumstances, finessing the party’s divisions, reimagining its message, and pulling a realigning election out of the air. But many politicians could have done worse — losing either the base or their path to the center, and gaining a landslide loss for their efforts. Given Romney’s temperament, his skill set, his background, maybe this was the best he could have done with the materials he was given.

Yes, there were the “47 percent” comments, but … okay, no, I have no defense to issue on that front. I don’t think it was Romney’s “true” self being exposed, but it was bad enough: An example of how his consultant’s willingness to play to his audience’s expectations can lead to the most dismal sort of pandering, and a window into a portion of the Republican mind that deserves rejection and defeat.

But even after that seemingly irrecoverable disaster, Romney actually recovered. He outdebated a sitting president famous for his eloquence, and he followed up on that success with a highly effective closing pitch, coming into his own as a candidate at the moment when it mattered most. The pivots he’s made, the lines he’s tried out, the appeals he’s offered — yes, they could have been made earlier in the season, and yes, they could have been wedded to a stronger policy message, but they were enough to pull him into a lead into the national polls in October, which is something that few challengers going up against a sitting president get to enjoy, and put him a position where victory has actually been within his reach.

Every losing presidential candidate probably believes that with a few breaks they could have won, but if Romney loses that will be truer for him than it was for Mondale or Dukakis or Dole or even John Kerry. Precisely because he has come so very close — leading in the national polls for two weeks, just a point or two off in the swing states he needs to win at various moments, lacking only some final hinge moment or stroke of luck — if he ultimately loses it’s hard to imagine him being remembered as dismissively as most failed contenders tend to be remembered. He won’t be eulogized as a beautiful loser like McGovern or Goldwater, remembered fondly by pundits and idea people on both sides of the aisle, but he also won’t become a punchline or a tragic figure or a “let’s forget that ever happened” kind of candidate. He’ll be in a class by himself — remembered, I suspect, the way everything in his background suggests he’d want to be remembered: As the man who outworked all his rivals, the losing nominee who left it all on the field, and the Republican who gave the once-untouchable Barack Obama the race of his political life.

And hey — he still might actually win this thing.

What's Next

About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.